My family didn’t intend to kill Cantonese, but we did it anyway.
I can’t give you a specific date or time of demise. I just know that it happened. Paradoxically, I’m the living proof of its death.
*
When did it all go linguistically pear-shaped? My dad and his family grew up speaking Cantonese in Southeast Asia; my mom is third-generation Japanese-American. My brother and I grew up in Canada. Our family language was English. We learned French at school. When we heard Cantonese, it was usually spoken into the telephone late at night, when long-distance rates were cheaper, or at dim sum restaurants on the weekend. Of the 10 words or so that I know in Cantonese, almost all of them relate to food.
*
By the time that I was born, English had been my father’s primary language for more than a decade. His parents lived 4000 km away; his nearest sibling 3000 km. It felt alien and unnatural to speak Cantonese to me when I was a baby, he said. In rural Canada, where a dairy farm was our nearest neighbour, there were no other Chinese people, nobody else with whom to converse on a regular basis.
Maybe that’s how my family killed Cantonese. But now that I’m a parent raising my kids in a country where English isn’t spoken in everyday life, I don’t blame my dad.
*
My grandparents came to the United States in their 60s, refugees from the wave of communist revolutions that began in China and swept through Southeast Asia. They spent the rest of their lives in diaspora communities in Hawaii and California. My grandmother knew only a few English words. My grandfather had a functional knowledge of the language, but it was better suited to grocery-shopping and paying for bus fare than for heart-to-heart chats. Nevertheless, we tried. When I went off to boarding school, I wrote letters to him in English, trying to keep my sentences short and simple. He sent me birthday cards in Chinese, which my friends translated for me.
*
All my attempts to learn Cantonese resulted in total failures. I’ve always wondered whether being tone-deaf made it harder than it might otherwise have been, or whether I subconsciously found it too intimidating. Certainly my parents never pushed me to learn the language, and though as a teenager I tried not wholly unsuccessfully teach myself Russian I was an indifferent self-taught student of Cantonese.
*
I remember, at the age of twenty, reading out typical tourist sentences from a Cantonese phrasebook. To my dad and his siblings, it sounded like nonsense; my grandfather, perhaps possessing more patience or a better ear, was the only one who managed to understand me. After that, I never tried again. What use was a rotely-repeated “I would like to order a cab” when what I really wanted to discuss was the Chinese Civil War and the events that led my grandparents to flee the country.
*
In 2013, our extended family gathered for what would prove to be one last time in Hawaii. I remember how much I envied one of my older cousins, who had settled in Hong Kong after university. He moved between Cantonese and English with an effortlessness that I couldn’t even begin to dream of.
That was the last time that I saw my grandfather. He died the following year, 101 years old.
*
When I see people shrugging their shoulders at language death, I’m (somewhat fittingly) left speechless. My family killed Cantonese and, so doing, cut me off from half my past and most of a culture.
Yet, in a way, I’m lucky: outside my family, Cantonese is still very much alive. Given enough time and determination, I could probably learn it. Online resources abound, and my father and friends would be happy to help me. In the meantime, I watch Hong Kong movies and listen to the BBC World Service in Cantonese, the rise and fall of its tones at once a comfort and regret.
Other people and other cultures don’t necessarily have this luxury. Their language might have no written form, no grammar books, no dictionaries. It might not be spoken by young people, meaning that without intervention it will die with its elders. When they are gone, we lose ways of thinking and looking at the world that aren’t found in other languages. We lose a way of understanding ourselves and positioning ourselves in time and space in relation to our ancestors and descendants. We lose a people’s history in their own words, and instead must strive to understand them through a lens that necessarily distorts their stories. All this I lost—yet I am also keenly aware that in a sense I never had it. I do not wish the same for anyone else.